Memory-chip crisis prompts Apple and suppliers to prepare for prolonged price surge

Apple’s Tim Cook warns of a ‘hundred-year flood’ in memory-chip markets, leading to potential product price hikes and sustained bullishness among chipmakers like Sandisk and Micron amid ongoing shortages.

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, has underscored just how severe the memory-chip squeeze has become, describing the market as a “hundred-year flood”. The comment reflects a rare disruption in pricing for NAND and DRAM, the two memory categories that underpin smartphones, laptops and data-centre hardware. For Apple, the pressure is immediate: higher component costs are already squeezing margins and are likely to force further price increases across its product range.

According to MacRumors, Apple has already told investors and customers that higher memory and storage costs are no longer manageable within current pricing. The publication reported that the company is preparing broad hardware price increases, with the iPhone 18 Pro line among the products most likely to be affected, alongside possible rises for iPads and Macs. Tom’s Hardware reported that Apple said memory costs hit gross margin in the June quarter and are expected to climb again in the September quarter.

The problem is not limited to Apple. MacRumors reported that Amazon raised its 2026 capital spending forecast because of dearer memory chips, a sign that large cloud and artificial intelligence operators are facing the same inflationary pressure. The shortage has also fed through to retail availability: MacRumors reported in March that Apple’s online store saw sharp price increases on external storage products, with some models selling out entirely as supply tightened.

For chipmakers, the reversal has been dramatic. Sandisk, which makes NAND memory, and Micron, which produces both NAND and DRAM, are among the clearest beneficiaries. The Motley Fool said Sandisk’s latest quarterly results showed revenue up 372% from a year earlier, with most of that growth driven by higher prices rather than volume. Micron has also said the tight market is likely to persist beyond 2027, suggesting that relief for buyers may still be some way off.

That backdrop helps explain why investors are still willing to back the suppliers despite the risk that memory cycles eventually cool. The Motley Fool noted that Sandisk trades on about 6.3 times forecast 2027 earnings, while Micron is valued at about 5.7 times that year’s earnings. In a market where demand from data centres is still crowding out supply, those valuations imply that the upswing may not be over yet.